For this particular aspect of Shestowsky’s study, 336 litigants to civil cases with a median amount in controversy of $35,000 were interviewed within three weeks of the closure of their case. The litigants were drawn from three jurisdictions (in California, Oregon and Utah) that had both mediation and arbitration programs for which all the surveyed litigants were eligible. Each of the three jurisdictions had a rule requiring attorneys to discuss ADR options with their clients.

Despite the rules requiring attorneys to discuss mediation and arbitration with their clients, there was no significant difference in responses between represented and unrepresented litigants. Further, only 31% of litigants said that they or their attorney contemplated mediation, while only 24% had contemplated arbitration. The only factor that increased the likelihood of litigants knowing whether their court offered ADR was whether they were repeat players. Repeat players were 2.53 times more likely to know whether the court had ADR programs.

The results are surprising. Not only do the three courts have requirements for discussing ADR, but the Utah and Oregon courts made ADR the default, requiring the parties to take action to avoid mediation and arbitration. Shestowsky concludes that “discussions about procedure did not take place at all, were not flagged as important, or were not conducted in an in-depth or personalized enough way to trigger deep processing,” meaning that they didn’t have enough of a discussion for the information about ADR to stick in the litigants’ memory.

These findings are not just important to those who advocate for ADR, but have a real impact on litigants and the courts. If litigants don’t know the options available to them, or haven’t had them fully explained, they aren’t giving informed consent to participate in the chosen process. On the other side of the coin, it appears that courts are allocating funds to processes that aren’t being used fully because litigants don’t know about them. Additionally, a key finding of the study is that those litigants who knew that the court offered mediation had a higher opinion of the court than those who did not. This suggests that courts can benefit by having litigants be better-educated about their ADR options, even if they don’t elect to use them.

Shestowsky’s research gives us in the ADR field useful information about how little litigant awareness there is about ADR options even when court rules are designed to ensure that litigants can make informed decisions about the process to use. She points to courts whose processes force more litigant acknowledgement of having been educated about ADR as possible models for increasing awareness. The next step should be to test these different processes for educating litigants to determine which is most effective, particularly for those litigants who are less sophisticated.

Last week I had the honor of accompanying Jennifer Shack, RSI’s remarkable Director of Research, to Washington, DC. Jen is the principal investigator on an RSI evaluation of the child protection mediation program[1] in the DC Courts. I came along to facilitate the focus groups that are part of the evaluation. Each of the focus groups brought together a distinct group of lawyers who participate in mediation regularly: Guardians ad litem, lawyers for parents and prosecutors. The focus groups provided insight into how differing interests shape how mediation is perceived.

I found that my mediation skills, honed over many years, made it easy to shift into the role of focus group facilitator. Asking open-ended questions, encouraging everyone to participate and keeping the conversation moving were all familiar. Unlike mediation, the group didn’t have a goal of reaching agreement and I found that to be kind of liberating! What was more surprising to me was that it was difficult to remove my trainer/teacher “hat.” When a participant made a comment based on a misunderstanding of mediation, I had to resist the urge to engage in a conversation to educate the participant about mediation.

The groups of lawyers came from very different perspectives and often had different goals for mediation. (more…)

A recent study out of Columbia University suggests that nice mediators finish last. Inspired by the familiar trope of bickering siblings setting aside their differences to unite against a stern parent, researcher Ting Zhang created simulations in which student participants attempted to reach resolution using text-based chatrooms. Zhang added a further twist to the experiment by introducing computerized participants and/or mediators in some of the sessions (though all participants were told they were interacting with other humans). The participating students were randomly assigned a hostile mediator, a neutral mediator or a nice mediator. Across all of these different scenarios, however, the data showed that agreement was more likely when the participants teamed up against a hostile mediator, and that the quality of the agreements reached was similar to those reached with a nice mediator. (more…)

I had the honor of presenting at the Maryland Judiciary’s ADR Research Symposium a couple of weeks ago. The purpose of the symposium was to inform judges and court personnel of the results of a six-year research project examining ADR programs and processes. It reminded me of just how well Maryland has planned and implemented its ADR system. Because it serves as a model, I’d like to provide a little background about this before discussing the research. (more…)

I’m so happy to introduce the Model Surveys, a toolkit that enables court-connected mediation programs to obtain reliable data. The toolkit includes post-mediation surveys for parties, attorneys and mediators, as well as a mediator report. The surveys are all annotated, with explanations for the rationale for each question and discussion of the wording. The toolkit is rounded out with advice on how to use and modify the surveys.

The whole idea behind the project is that courts and their associated programs often don’t have the necessary resources to obtain good information about program functioning. In RSI’s experience, the courts’ biggest need was for well-designed participant surveys and set out to develop them in collaboration with the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution and with the help of a fantastic group of nationally-known experts in ADR research and program administration. (more…)